The dominoes keep falling in the mobile phone industry as another major producer of smartphones had decided to forgo an analog audio port for its flagship product. The Moto Z and Moto Z Force both are lacking a 3.5mm headphone jack. While they do come with a USB-C adapter in the box, the 5.2mm thick phones are only slightly thicker than the adapters they possess, so from an engineering point of view, there aren’t many benefits to the change in listening design.
With rumors swirling around that the AppleiPhone 7 will be following the same trend of shipping without a 3.5mm jack for the last few months, slowly but surely more and more of the industry is moving in this direction. Lenovo’s possible motive behind switching over is that its main competitor LeEco had already announced that its 2016 product line would be devoid of the analog jack as well as being driven by the need to push the better quality and overall performance of the wavelengths via the USB-C port.
The distaste for the move over to digital is obvious among customers who have heard the news. Eliminating something so basic with a less than reliable replacement by requiring an adapter is not the solution. All of this seems a little premature given the market limits right now even with the upside of improved audio quality.
